The language of business has long been filled with acronyms—many we know and use fluently and others that confuse us because they are completely foreign. Three acronyms related to privacy compliance are a must for our teams to understand: GDPR, CCPA, and now…CPRA.
Privacy compliance is a growing concern for consumers and brands. To maintain your sterling reputation as a trusted brand, your teams must focus on meeting these new requirements.
Privacy compliance can get pretty complicated. That’s why using a customer data platform (CDP) is your best bet for staying in compliance with privacy laws.
Key Benefits of a Customer Data Platform
Before we jump into how a CDP helps you stay compliant, let’s review the key benefits of a customer data platform. A CDP is packaged software deployed as Software as a Service (SaaS) that collects and unifies customer data from point-solutions to create a comprehensive customer profile with insights.
A CDP like Skypoint Cloud:
- Creates a single view of customer data.
- Connects this data to other applications to enhance analytics.
- Optimizes engagement across programs.
- Improves marketing performance.
- Enhances analytics.
- Ensures compliance (CCPA, GDPR, CPRA)
- Offers insights that facilitate personalized experiences and better ROI.
- Offers industry’s first modern “lakehouse” technology supporting ACID transactions and scalable metadata handling,
- Unifies streaming and batch data processing utilizing Apache Spark and Delta Lake.
The buyer’s journey has become increasingly digital and all brands must become digital too. Brands need to level-up their consumer data practices to continually build trust and provide personalized experiences. Companies that earn and maintain digital trust with customers will see 30% more digital commerce profits than their competitors by 2023, according to Gartner.
Gartner also predicts that by 2023, 65% of the world’s population will have personal information covered under modern privacy regulations. By 2024, more than 80% of organizations worldwide will face modern privacy and data protection requirements. As you can see, a CDP that supports privacy compliance initiatives isn’t a nice-to-have but a must-have.
Privacy Compliance Supported by a CDP
Below we give you a quick overview of all of the need-to-know acronyms—GDPR, CCPA, CPRA—and discuss how a privacy compliance supported CDP helps your teams adhere to these major privacy laws that have impacted brands globally.
GDPR
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a law that was put into effect in May 2018. GDPR sets guidelines for people living in the European Union (EU) and anyone operating a website in the area has to heed these guidelines, even if they don’t specifically market goods or services to EU residents. The law requires that EU visitors are provided a few data disclosures and take steps to let residents know what your process is in the event of a personal data breach.
Meeting GDPR requirements is a lot easier with GDPR compliance software, which helps you collect personal data legally and under strict conditions. As you know, when collecting and managing personally identifiable information (PII), it’s important that you do all you can to protect it from misuse and exploitation and respect the rights of the data owners. Skypoint’s CDP centralizes all of your customer data and preferences so that your programs are always GDPR compliant.
CCPA and CPRA
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is a privacy law that went into effect in January 2020. Similar in nature to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, the law gives consumers in California additional rights and protections regarding how businesses can use their personal information, according to Investopedia.
The California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA) passed in November 2020 and takes effect in January 2023. CPRA will move California privacy regulation closer to the standards of the GDPR. CPRA will expand on the existing CCPA and could have a significant effect on your business.
Regardless of how close your business is to California, you’ll be subject to major changes, including having a higher obligation to protect the privacy rights of your employees and independent contractors.
With Skypoint’s My Privacy Center, consumer privacy, consent preferences, and consumer data subject requests are a breeze—because everything is managed in one place. Within a brand-customized portal, you empower your customers to self-manage their privacy choices and Skypoint then synchronizes these preferences across all of your systems and departments.
Having a single source of truth is really the main benefit of a CDP that supports privacy compliance. Consolidating customer data records across multiple channels to create a unified profile (including communications preferences) ensures customers who have opted-out for specific communications never appear in lists that would have otherwise targeted them. Overall, it’s a simpler process for your teams.
Achieving Privacy Compliance in Marketing
Marketers have a bit of a love-hate relationship with data, much of which comes down to managing and connecting consumer data.
When optimizing ad performance, Harvard Business Review research found that nearly a third of marketers faced the challenge of “too much data to analyze.” Facing “too much consumer data” is not only making it more difficult for marketers to effectively run campaigns, but it’s also making it more difficult for them to keep data protected.
That’s why you need to find a solution that allows you to perform marketing activities and collect customer data in a way that complies with privacy laws. Within Skypoint Cloud’s customer data platform, identity resolution helps you get there. What’s great about identity resolution is it unifies transactional, observational, and behavioral data from your systems, bringing everything together into a singular customer profile.
Relying on the intermingling of first-party customer data with third-party sources is problematic for so many reasons. The most glaring reason being that disconnected systems might cause your marketing and sales teams to unknowingly violate privacy laws. Skypoint’s CDP performs identity resolution by using first-party data only, thereby side-stepping potentially thorny privacy issues that come with using a third-party.
If you want to create a unified and protected customer experience, you need unified customer data and PII. Skypoint’s identity resolution software is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, allowing you to automate data discovery while giving you a comprehensive 360 view of your customers.
We’re living in an increasingly privacy-focused world. Now that you have a better understanding of how your decisions impact your customers and your brand, it’s time to take the next steps by using a CDP that helps you market with confidence. Request a demo to see just how easy privacy compliance is with Skypoint Cloud.
